They screamed and threw their hands in the air as if a rock star were walking on stage.
“Dalai! Dalai!” the teenagers chanted, whistling and clicking their camera phones as His Holiness the Dalai Lama entered the arena.
Devin Anderson, a 17-year-old from Memphis, Tenn., with baggy pants and a diamond stud flashing off one earlobe, stood on top of his folding chair on the floor of Magness Arena at the University of Denver.
Beside him, Sonam Dhondup, a 19-year-old Tibetan Buddhist who threw a robe on over his street clothes, was awestruck as he touched his hands together in front of him and bowed his head.
The two young men were among 2,300 students from around the world in Denver this weekend for PeaceJam, a conference to introduce youths to 10 winners of the Nobel Peace Prize – the largest gathering of peace laureates ever in the United States.
“I don’t think they are celebrities, but they are something better,” said Helle Hadler- Jacobsen, a teenager from Trondheim, Norway.
Her hero is Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian who won the peace prize in 2003 for her women’s rights work in the Middle East.
The students, who represented 31 countries, studied the lives of the laureates before coming to Denver. At PeaceJam, each student group pledged to create some peace in a little corner of the world, whether by taking back a neighborhood park, rescuing classmates from gangs or raising money to stop the spread of malaria in Africa.
Students had to describe their service projects on poster board and give two-minute presentations to a Nobel Peace Prize winner during small breakout sessions.
Anderson, who got a slot in Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s group, wants to fight materialism, which he says is the root cause of drug dealing.
Students clamored to take photographs with Tutu, who worked to peacefully end apartheid in South Africa, and shouted “I love you, Tutu!”
“The world is hurting,” he told them. “We must not give up on the world.”
Wale Agboola, an 18-year-old who grew up in Nigeria, said he felt Tutu’s energy. Agboola’s father often talked about Tutu, and Agboola did a class project about him.
“It’s amazing,” he said. “I am just jumping off my feet right now.”
PeaceJam participants, staying in hotels and with Denver host families, bonded in groups of 10 – their “families” for the weekend.
Student after student – those sporting mohawks or turquoise hair standing next to those in head scarves or traditional Tibetan robes – said they fed off one another’s ideas and felt inspired to go home and promote change.
“It’s like the energy and the feeling you get after it – it’s just so inspiring for me and pushes me forward,” said Moises Munoz, a DU student.
Maliq Sisk, a 16-year-old from Aurora, said PeaceJam “isn’t just a time for us to be hippies.”
“This is a time for us to change the world,” he said. “We’re a new generation, an evolution of mankind that thinks differently about the world.”
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-954-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
